


Accidents Will Happen

by jujubiest



Series: Barrison One-Shots [3]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Eobard's perspective, Gen, character musings, everybody loves Barry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-02 04:04:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5233358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jujubiest/pseuds/jujubiest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Set sometime during season one, before Barry starts to suspect Harrison Wells. Title taken from the Elvis Costello song.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Accidents Will Happen

**Author's Note:**

> Set sometime during season one, before Barry starts to suspect Harrison Wells. Title taken from the Elvis Costello song.

Barry Allen doesn’t just love people, he practically _collects_ them. Draws them in around him like a shield against the world. If he can’t have a mother and a father, he’ll have a foster father, a surrogate sister, a reluctantly accepted coworker-in-law or three, or four. A soulmate, here and there, an affectionate nuisance or two. A mentor.

People flock to Barry, to his bright eyes and his easy smile, to his quick step and his natural sincerity. He collects people who will love him, and makes it worth their while by loving them in return, just as hard if not _twice_ as hard.

It’s a puzzling thing to Eobard Thawne, to find himself being slowly but surely drawn into that warm circle of accidental, haphazard, makeshift family. It’s not something he understands, which bothers him, and not something he’s entirely immune to, which scares him. What is the point, he wonders, of building a wall of people around you for protection, if you’re only going to throw yourself in front of them at the first sign of danger? What is Barry Allen guarding against, with all of these people he gathers? What is the point of making yourself a human shield for your own support system?

But then, Eobard has never understood Barry Allen, not when he hated him, and even less now that what he feels for him is more akin to…he doesn’t know what to call it. He just knows that the cold rage and hatred he felt only a few months ago, sitting next to Barry’s hospital bed, watching the monitors measure his life in breaths and heartbeats…somehow, when he looks at Barry now, it’s all but gone.

What’s left in its place is small, and warm…a pride he has no right to, a happiness and a sense of belonging that aren't really his. Something he could get lost in, if he let himself. Something he might learn to want more than a way home, and how does he even dare to think that? He doesn’t belong here, in this barbaric time. He doesn’t belong on the periphery of Barry’s circle of warmth and light and trust. He belongs there possibly less than anyone. But god, does he lean toward that light in spite of himself, like a flower turning its face to the sun. Doesn’t he wish that things could be different. Doesn’t he wonder if somehow, he can make it so.

Doesn’t Barry Allen collect him, too, before it’s over with, in spite of himself. And doesn’t that hurt them both all the more, in the end.


End file.
